What’s New in Windows 8: High Graphics, Windows Apps Market Hype

Guest Post by Sachin…

Windows 8  Heavy on the Graphics, Hype at a Distance

Windows 8, scheduled for release in 2012, is likely to be a product which will get a lot of attention from Microsoft’s critics. The howls of criticism from Vista’s sorry market performance are also still ringing, and Windows 8 is getting a lot of pre-release rumour mill attention already, including, notably, many “What do you want to see in Windows 8?” polls. The only thing known for sure is that graphics are again a feature, but whether any application security concepts or other hard information related to the many Windows issues will be released remains to be seen.

Windows as a Market Icon

The Windows brand had a brief heyday of genuine consumer popularity between Windows 95, 98 and XP, a development of the NT series. In those eight years it became the world’s operating system. After the Vista debacle, Windows 7 had its own quirks, and the much cooler response to it, if not actively hostile as it was with Vista, was a sign that the heyday was either on hiatus or over. Windows 8 may not be a make or break for Microsoft, but a cooling market isn’t a great place to be releasing high end, high cost, products, particularly if there’s still a recession going on in 2012. A lot, therefore, is riding on Windows 8.

That’s one of the reasons for approaching the current hype with a lot of healthy skepticism.

Rumours so far include:

·  128-bit operational capacity

·  Tablet computers

·  Face recognition capabilities

If your reaction was “So what?” to tablets and face recognition and other antiques, you’d be right. Not new, not particularly wanted, and following Apple in terms of the tablets.

128 Bits ?

The 128 bit abilities, however, are a new ball game. That would really open up some possibilities, particularly for media. This capacity isn’t really required for a lot of typical computer functions, but it would break very new ground in a large range of heavy number crunching areas. 128 bits isn’t just “two 64 bits put together”, it’s a much higher level of handling. It’d also be great for high speed processors.

The 128 capacity does jive with the high emphasis on graphics, too, so this particular rumour could be more than just hype. Windows 8 images online (there are now literally millions of them) show a distinct tinge of anamorphic 3D, which would translate pretty easily into real 3D, with the right hardware.

A New Windows Marketplace?

A rumour which may have a grain of business sense is that a whole new Windows Marketplace is on the drawing board, to download Windows apps and make sure they run. That doesn’t quite fit the previous paradigm, but the previous mode was a failure, so maybe this rumour is true to some degree at least.

Possible downsides

A truly worrying idea floating around the net is that “Windows 8 will be designed to appeal to the younger users”. That could mean anything from crayon-level, bling-based functions to anti computer hacking ideas and some sort of youth culture motif the rest of the world could live without.

Let’s not write off Windows 8 as another Hollywood effort, but let’s not get too complacent, either.